THOUGHT FOR THE DAY!

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything - you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." -- Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On, 1940

YOUR RANDOM DHS MONITORED PHRASE OF THE DAY

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June 25, 2017

“ABC News was the only channel I watched as a child growing up in Texas but I think they have lost touch with America and forgotten the working man. They don’t represent our voice anymore. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was funded by the Clinton Foundation in close coordination with the media, and now we’re seeing them try to fix what they couldn’t fix during the election. They are doing everything they can, night after night, to create narratives and sway people’s direction to impeach Donald Trump. Our democracy is at stake when a major political party and the media are in bed together. I’m not asking anyone to boycott the Democratic party. I’m not in the brainwashing business, but the liberal media is.”

There is little doubt that America's bastions of higher indoctrination (a.k.a. "Universities") have become nothing more than training grounds for future generations of social justice warriors. The war for America's college campuses has become so heated that liberal administrators, the same people who used to pride themselves on challenging their students to step outside their comfort zone and open themselves up to dissenting opinions, have taken to shutting down free speech when it doesn't perfectly align with their 'enlightened' world view.

Al-Qaeda attacked a Syrian Arab Army position in Madinat al-Baath (map) next to the Israel occupied Golan heights. Al-Qaeda requested Israeli fire-support by launching some mortars towards empty space in the Israel occupied area. The Israeli Defense Force accepted the request and destroyed two Syrian Arab Army tanks. Two Syrian soldiers were killed. The SAA held steady and the al-Qaeda attack on its position failed.

As congressional grandstanders make self-serving speeches repeating the “Russian threat” lie and push for greater sanctions and actions against the world’s only other superpower, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh has once again released a bombshell article blowing the official story of the chemical weapons attack at Khan Sheikhoun out of the water. The article is a “chat protocol” between an American military soldier and an American Security analyst. The soldier is on active duty at a key airbase in the region although the location of his deployment is being kept secret for obvious reasons...

President Donald Trump ignored important intelligence reports when he decided to attack Syria after he saw pictures of dying children. Seymour M. Hersh investigated the case of the alleged Sarin gas attack.

On April 6, United States President Donald Trump authorized an early morning Tomahawk missile strike on Shayrat Air Base in central Syria in retaliation for what he said was a deadly nerve agent attack carried out by the Syrian government two days earlier in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.

New immigration data has been released and the figures are incredibly alarming. Last year, the UK had the highest population growth since 1947, and guess what, it isn’t due to more British babies being born.

After decades of a drug war, authoritarianism and hundreds of billions of dollars, scientists are finally starting to discover what 20-year-old hippie kids bouncing from festival to festival could have told them all along: magic mushrooms help with depression. A study that was published in the Lancet details an experiment that involved...

Soon after New Jersey’s Wall Township High School was caught digitally removing President Donald Trump’s name from two students’ yearbook photos, our beloved Commander-In-Chief went on Facebook to post an official letter thanking the students for their continued support and freedom of expression.

The emergence of low-cost micro satellites is starting to spawn a global surveillance arms race: the familiar problem-reaction-solution paradigm upon what all other arms races are built. “Our competitors will learn to use this exploding geo-enabled capability to learn a lot of things. If we don’t use this as well as them and use our exquisite assets to be a differentiator and stay ahead, we’re going to get behind.” – Major Mike Little, U.S. Southern Command...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) said there isn’t a single American who has seen the Senate Republican’s health care bill yet. But he’s “sure the Russians have” gotten their hands on it, according to Bloomberg.

An Uber driver has been charged on suspicion of raping a passenger in Santa Ana while she was intoxicated, authorities said Wednesday. Angel Sanchez, 36, of Costa Mesa faces one felony count of rape of an intoxicated victim, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said, and up to eight years in prison if convicted. Prosecutors said the woman was at a company gathering in Newport Beach on March 30 when colleagues requested an Uber ride for her to her Santa Ana home. Sanchez picked up the woman in a 2016 Toyota Sienna and took her to a street near her home where he sexually assaulted her in the vehicle, prosecutors said.. The charge comes as Orange County attorneys and John Wayne Airport staffers are saying they will reassess the airport’s agreement with Uber in the wake of allegations that the company failed to investigate complaints filed against drivers contending they were driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

A SERIES of racist pictures of an airline passenger who was mistakenly believed to be a terrorist have gone viral, infuriating social media users.
The Snapchat user posted a string of captioned photos when he was seated in front of a passenger wearing a turban.
In the pictures, believed to have been shared earlier this week, the man singles out the Sikh passenger, writing: “Never mind I might not make it to Indy”.

In what the justice minister, Heiko Maas, called a “belated act of justice,” the German Parliament has voted unanimously to void the convictions of roughly 50,000 men prosecuted for homosexual acts since World War II.

Cleveland19 reports that Tyreke Smith, a high school junior football player, is one of the most sought-after athletes in Ohio. The Cleveland Heights High School junior is a four-star defensive end being recruited by some of the country’s top universities, including Ohio State. Tyreke showed up for a recruiting visit to the Columbus, Ohio, school Saturday sporting a T-shirt that read, “I hope I don’t get killed for being black today.”

Police are still struggling for words to describe the attack that took place in Baxley Thursday afternoon after a mother and her daughter were assaulted at their family-owned restaurant.
When you leave veteran lawmen speechless, you've reached a new low.

A Parker County mother who told investigators that she locked her two children in a hot car as punishment was arrested Friday, authorities said.
The two children were pronounced dead after being found in the car on the afternoon of May 26, which at the time was the hottest day of the year.
Cynthia Marie Randolph, 25, told investigators with the Parker County Sheriff’s Office that she was trying to teach her 2-year-old daughter a lesson by putting in the car with her 16-month-old brother.

Trends forecaster Gerald Celente thinks the economy is so weak that it must be propped up by massive fraud, and that means any black swan can sink this economic scam overnight. Celente contends, “It’s over, it’s over and that’s why gold is the ultimate safe haven to me.”

Co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement says recent feminist hero Kamala Harris and three other Democratic female senators did not ask a single question during a hearing on the ideology of political Islam and its brutal treatment of women.

Bush says Trump was a Democrat longer than a Republican in the last decade

(*something to fall back on if his sentiment on civilian casualties has negative backlash , or acing every backassward neocon idea , like; The Suits Should Stay Out Of It , And Let The Military Run It's. Own Affairs ?)

Just when geopolitical practitioners were betting on regime change in Qatar – orchestrated by a desperate House of Saud – regime change ended up happening in Riyadh, orchestrated by Warrior Prince, Destroyer of Yemen and Blockader of Qatar, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS).

Considering the impenetrability of that desert petrodollar family oligarchy impersonating a nation it’s up to a few foreigners granted access to make sense of the latest Arabian Game of Thrones. It also does not help that the “largesse” of Saudi – and Emirati – lobbies in Washington reduces virtually every think tank and hack in sight to abject sycophancy.

Webmaster's Commentary:

It sounds as though the royal House of Saud is about to implode, but not before it does a great deal more regional damage than it has already done in Yemen, which has been viciously savage, and was very much the brain-child of Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

The Saudi/UAE "conditions" to which Qatar is supposed to accede by 2 July (one week from today" are untenable to both Qatar and Turkey, which has about 3,000 troops on the ground here, and a military base.

Week after next week is the 4th of July Independence Day holiday in the United States; if Prince Salman moves against Qatar militarily, my guess would be that it would be on or around that date, when Americans are distracted with 4th of July festivities.

And I have to wonder; should that happen, what are the standing orders which have been given to the commanders of nearly 10,000 US military personnel working in Qatar?!?

Seized by violence and teetering on the edge of famine, Yemen is grappling with another danger that threatens to outpace them both: cholera.

"We are now facing the worst cholera outbreak in the world," international health authorities said in a statement Saturday.

Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF, and Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, say that "more than 1,300 people have died — one quarter of them children — and the death toll is expected to rise."

They suspect that is because Yemen now has upwards of 200,000 cases to grapple with, and that number is growing quickly — by a rate of roughly 5,000 cases a day.

"And geographically, it is expanding," Mohamed El Montassir Hussein, Yemen director for the International Rescue Committee, told NPR's Jason Beaubien earlier this month. "It's not a small area. It's almost the whole country."

Webmaster's Commentary:

What is interesting is what this article doesn't say; which is, that as a result of US-enabled, Saudi blockade of Yemen's ports, which means food cannot get it, Yemeni children are dying from complications of malnutrition.

The Saudis and their American backers are not idiots; they knew that by creating this massive state of malnutrition in Yemen's kids, they were deliberately creating a condition where diseases would thrive, and cholera took up their invitation.

Another possible answer to the question of how this epidemic got so out of control so quickly, is the deliberate poisoning of Yemeni water systems with this disease; it would not have been the first time, historically, this has happened:

Collective punishment is a war crime, period, end of discussion; and yet, the Saudi, US-enabled genocide in Yemen, including the assassination of innocent civilians; the blockade of ports creating malnutrition deaths in Yemen's kids, the subsequent diseases, like cholera, and the used of depleted uranium weapons, and the subsequent birth defects; cancers; and still births, continues here, unabated.

Israel is closing the bank accounts of Arab institutions in Jerusalem in an effort to displace Jerusalemites and force them out of the city, the Department of Jerusalem Affairs has said.

In a press release, the organisation said the Israeli occupation’s moves against social, cultural, educational, relief, housing, legal or engineering institutions were political and go hand in hand with the Israeli policy of collective punishment against the defenseless Palestinian civilians in order to Judaise the city by force.

Webmaster's Commentary:

How completely typical of Tel Aviv; an economic component to Israel's "Final Solution" of the "Palestinian Problem".

In the maelstrom that has followed the Grenfell Tower fire, it has fallen to a perhaps unlikely figure to speak up for the residents and ask searching questions of the authorities.

Lily Allen lives in the shadow of the tower block and witnessed the unfolding tragedy in the early hours of June 14. Since then, she has been a constant presence at the scene, helping the victims and attempting to understand their concerns, but also giving commentary on the relief efforts and exploring the reasons behind the disaster.

Webmaster's Commentary:

To the people who managed Grenfell Tower, the people living there were simply ...expendable. Decisions could be made about building materials, like the very flammable cladding which were profoundly, amazingly stupid, and short sighted.

The investigation here should be criminal in nature, not civil, and those people who willingly, and knowingly, made these decisions punished, severely, and the people of the UK should never have to live in unsafe housing again.

Lily Allen is a heroine to me, and I am sure, to many of those who had families, now lost, from this horrendous fire.

? ecent news reports describe a massive increase in civilian casualties at the hands of the US military or US allies. In Mosul, Iraq, hundreds of residents have been killed as US forces join Iraqi troops in the last stage of their assault on the ISIS-held city. In Yemen, the United States is increasing its direct involvement in the Saudi-led air war being waged against the poorest country in the Arab world, as the UN and other aid workers struggle against mass famine and a looming cholera epidemic on top of the thousands already killed and millions displaced. And in Raqqa, Syria, US air strikes and white-phosphorus munitions have led to what the UN calls “a staggering loss of life,” as Washington provides backup to Kurdish and Arab forces now besieging the ISIS stronghold.

“Rarely a day goes by now when we don’t see three or four civilian casualty incidents…around Raqqa....” —AirWars

Webmaster's Commentary:

This... is what "collateral damage" looks like in Yemen, courtesy of US military-enabled Saudi genocide against Yemeni children, killed outright, or maimed for life:

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has issued a report today covering the civilian death toll of US-led coalition airstrikes in Syria over the past month, from May 23 to June 23, reporting at least 472 civilians, the largest in any 30-day period since the US started bombing Syria in 2014.

The attacks covered two provinces in Syria, with 222 civilians killed in Deir Ezzor, and the other 250 civilians killed in the Raqqa Province. Strikes against the area immediately surrounding Raqqa were nominally done in support of the Kurdish YPG’s advance on ISIS’ capital, the city of Raqqa.

In Deir Ezzor, much of the death toll was in airstrikes against buildings in the city of Mayadin, where huge numbers of civilian relatives of ISIS fighters were said to be killed, many of them young children. Over the two provinces, the Syrian Observatory counted 137 children killed in the US-led attacks.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is a propaganda front, funded by the EU.

TURKEY will stop teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in high schools, deeming it controversial and difficult to understand, a senior education official says.

Critics say President Tayyip Erdogan and the Islamist-rooted AK Party are undermining modern Turkey’s secular foundations by pushing a conservative agenda, including tighter regulation of alcohol and other restrictions, since coming to power in 2002.

A chapter entitled Beginning of Life and Evolution will be deleted from the standard biology textbooks used in schools and the material will be available only to students who go on to university studies from age 18 or 19, Alparslan Durmus, head of the national education board said in an online address this week.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The American comedian Ron White has a one-liner which absolutely applies here: "You can't fix stupid."

And this ham-fistedly, pig-headedly stupid move has obviously been done to dumb down Turkish high school students by people who utterly do not understand the incontrovertible science of evolution.

There’s currently a push in the halls of Washington D.C., to establish a new branch of the military by 2019, one whose focus would be operations among the stars. Proposed legislation by House representatives would create a “Space Corps” that would serve “as a separate military service within the Department of the Air Force.”

It would be the first branch added to the military since 1947 when the Air Force was officially established.

On Tuesday, the top two lawmakers of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Representatives Mike Rogers and Jim Cooper, added the legislation to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The subcommittee oversees military space operations and works within the umbrella of the House Armed Services Committee.

“There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the strategic advantages we derive from our national security space systems are eroding,” Rogers and Cooper said in a joint statement.

The government is spying on most Americans through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our credit cards and smart meters, televisions, dolls, and in many other ways.

Yesterday, ZDNet reported that the NSA uses a trick to get around the few flimsy American laws on spying … they shuttle internet traffic overseas so they can pretend they’re monitoring foreign communications:

A new analysis of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden details a highly classified technique that allows the National Security Agency to “deliberately divert” US internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This... is why intelligent people either encrypt their communications securely, or only say very vanilla stuff in their emails or social media.

When banks fail and regulators decide to liquidate them, it happens on Friday evening so that there is a weekend to clean up the mess. And this is what happened in Italy – with two banks!

It’s over for the two banks that have been prominent zombies in the Italian banking crisis: Veneto Banca and Banca Popolare di Vicenza, in northeastern Italy.

The banks have combined assets of €60 billion, a good part of which are toxic and no one wanted to touch them. They already received a bailout but more would have been required, and given the uncertainty and the messiness of their books, nothing was forthcoming, and the ECB which regulates them lost its patience.

In a tersely worded statement, the ECB’s office of Banking Supervision ordered the banks to be wound up because they “were failing or likely to fail as the two banks repeatedly breached supervisory capital requirements.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

The Euro itself is set to fall and fail; it not a matter of if, but when.

A CORPORATE DATABASE used by banks and other institutions to screen clients for crimes such as money laundering and terror financing has labeled dozens of U.S. citizens as connected to terrorism on the basis of outdated or unsubstantiated allegations. An analysis of a 2014 copy of the database, which is known as World-Check, also indicates that many thousands of people, including children, were listed on the basis of tenuous links to crime or to politically prominent persons.

The database relied on allegations stemming from right-wing Islamophobic websites to categorize under “terrorism” people and groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, several mosques, and national and regional Islamic organizations.

Webmaster's Commentary:

That databases like this can be used to smear people who are perfectly innocent of wrongdoing smacks of Orwellian wrong-doing on a ginormous scale.

Trey Gowdy destroyed former DHS chief, Jeh Johnson during his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. Former DHS chief under Obama, Jeh Johnson said that the DNC, to his ‘disappointment,’ did not cooperate with DHS to respond to the hacks.

June 24, 2017

The winter-chasing scientists from the world's largest space organisation are preparing for lift off in their flying observatory.

Nasa's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (Sofia), a highly modified jetliner carrying a huge internal telescope, arrived in Christchurch from Honolulu yesterday and on Monday will soar high into the stratosphere to observe the otherwise unobservable universe.

For the next two months, a crew of some 125 scientists, astronomers, mechanics and technicians will be based at the US National Science Foundation's Antarctic Programme facility at Christchurch International Airport. It is the fourth trip to Christchurch for Sofia.

We all put a price on our health, whether it’s our willingness to shell out a few extra dollars for organic fruit at the store or deciding that yoga classes are a good investment. However, have you ever thought about the opposite side of the coin? Would you accept a sizable sum of money to put your health at risk? That’s exactly what some Southampton University researchers are counting on.

In an effort to make an improved vaccine to “protect” vulnerable parties against whooping cough, the researchers are looking to pay people as much as £3,526 ($4499.33 at today’s exchange rate) to be infected with the disease and then live in isolation units for 17 days. This means that not only do volunteers get sick on purpose, but they also get to help create dangerous vaccines that parents will be strong-armed into giving their children for years to come.

In November of last year, India banned certain cash notes in a bold move to force businesses into the banking system to better harvest more taxes from its livestock. Now, under the guise of “improving transparency” and forming a “common market,” India has begun targeting gold with new taxes, regulation, and incentives for citizens to turn over their undeclared gold to the financial sector...